You can’t just leave me…

I really do love to experiment with my shooting and post-processing. For this particular scene, I knew that I wanted to focus most of the attention on the cool looking couch, and the best way to isolate was to use my tilt-shift lens wide open at f/3.5, and tilted almost completely in the opposite direction of the couch. At the same time, I also knew that I wanted to get the bricks in the ceiling on the left side of the frame in good focus. I know…can’t do that with a tilt/shift. Ahh, but you can. All you have to do is take one set of brackets with the focus on the chair, then refocus on the ceiling and blast of another set of brackets. Once I ran both sets of brackets through Photomatix Pro, I opened both resulting tonemapped images in Photoshop, one layered on top of the other. Finally, I used my Wacom table and a layer mask to paint the sharp parts I wanted of one image into the blurred out areas of my main image (main image being the one with the sharply focused couch), et voilà!

Heath O’Fee–I don’t know how you keep finding these lone chairs and couches…sometimes I think you drive a huge semi-trailer loaded with discarded furniture and just drag in whatever you need for the scene 😉

Jacques –Hey guys. Sorry to took me a back here to thank you all for the comments. You guys are really very kind; I really appreciate the thoughtful comments. Regarding the chairs and couches, I wish I had the resources to bring props to various locations, ’cause I’ve got some cool ideas of setups I’d love to shoot. Alas I’m stuck with what’s there, and more often than not I’m too lazy to rearrange big furniture. Smaller chairs and such are fair game and I ha been known to grab a smaller chair and carry all the way across a compound just in case I come across a “perfect” stage for it.

December 4, 2010 - 16:59

Monique Cousineau–I love this image, so lush and textural (simply steeped in color) and so very sad.